Inside the Higher Ed Scam, debt forgiveness edition
By 
In one of her many appalling acts as Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos refused to forgive debt for students swindled by for-profit colleges. Game recognize game, after all. The Biden administration has ended this malpractice:
The Biden administration on Wednesday canceled more than $6 billion in student debt for 317,000 people who attended the Art Institutes, a now-defunct network of for-profit colleges that President Biden said “knowingly misled” students.
After a review of lawsuits brought by state attorneys general against the schools and their parent company, Education Management Corporation, the Education Department found that the Art Institutes falsified job placement figures in advertisements and misled prospective students with inflated salary expectations.
In one case the department highlighted, an Art Institute campus in Florida appeared to have included the tennis star Serena Williams’s annual income in its graduate salary projections after she had attended classes there.
“This institution falsified data, knowingly misled students and cheated borrowers into taking on mountains of debt without leading to promising career prospects at the end of their studies,” President Biden said in a statement.
I thought Paul would particularly appreciate the inclusion of Serena Williams in the mean salary data. I assume a Brian Leiter crony is at work on a piece about how a degree from the Art of Institute of Florida was worth ONE MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS until the woke mob shut it down.
Forgiving debt accrued to attend institutions maybe one step up the ethical ladder from Trump University is a no-brainer for anyone who isn’t a reactionary crank. (I always cringe on Chopped reruns when they offer the teenager who wins the special competition a scholarship to the Art Institute’s culinary school, a “prize” that surely has negative net value.) Another question is what to do about non-profit colleges that shut down, given that a disproportionate number of students in these situations don’t finish their degrees, and many were presumably recruited when colleges knew perfectly well they were in dire shape:
So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.
Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it.
The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished.
[…]
Already this year, and within a span of a few days, Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, Fontbonne University in St. Louis and Eastern Gateway Community College in Ohio all announced that they would close — Birmingham-Southern in May, Fontbonne next year and Eastern Gateway by June, unless it gets a financial bailout.
The for-profit University of Antelope Valley in California was ordered by the state to shut down because of financial shortfalls. Lincoln Christian University in Illinois and Magdalen College in New Hampshire will close in May, Johnson University of Florida in June and Hodges University in Florida by August. The College of Saint Rose in New York, Cabrini University in Pennsylvania, Oak Point University in Illinois, Goddard College in Vermont and the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University will all be shuttered by the end of this semester.
Notre Dame College in Ohio will also close its doors at the end of this semester, stranding for a second time students who transferred there from Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia, which shut down just days before classes were scheduled to begin last year.
Seven out of 10 students at colleges that have closed got little or no warning. Of those, a smaller proportion were likely to continue their educations than students at colleges that gave more notice and ended operations in an “orderly” way, the SHEEO study found.
These colleges generally shut down because of some combination of the demographic crunch and garden-variety mismanagement rather than actual fraud. But these closures, especially sudden ones. leave a lot of students with ample debt and no degree, and they would be excellent candidates for debt forgiveness. I hope it’s being considered.
…it’s been done!
Two years ago, Scotthttps://t.co/PpUKR3c7WV pic.twitter.com/ZAFUu7j4SG— David Dayen (@ddayen) May 2, 2024